Could BS jobs save the economy from an AI driven collapse of wages?

The argument has a dark elegance to it. The late anthropologist David Graeber spent years documenting what he called "bullshit jobs" — roles whose occupants privately suspected, sometimes openly admitted, produced nothing of measurable value. Middle-management layers that exist to buffer other middle-management layers. Compliance roles that comply with nothing that matters. Graeber meant the term as a critique, a damning verdict on late capitalism's tendency to manufacture busyness rather than meaning. What's new, surfacing in the Singularity Hub discussion dated March 22nd, is a genuinely strange inversion of his thesis: that those same jobs, the ones Graeber mourned as symptoms of dysfunction, might become economic stabilisers in an era when AI systematically removes the need for human cognitive labour. If automation drives wages down by eliminating the scarcity of knowledge work, the argument runs, then governments and corporations preserving or even deliberately creating roles that don't strictly need to exist might function as a kind of distributed income support — more politically palatable than universal basic income, more socially legible than direct transfers, and already structurally familiar to most large organisations.

If confirmed — if this line of thinking moves from fringe provocation to policy consideration — the implications cut in several uncomfortable directions at once. Economies that lean into this approach would be choosing visible employment over honest accounting of what work actually produces, which props up consumer spending and social cohesion in the short term while potentially calcifying inefficiency at scale. Workers in these roles would receive wages and, crucially, identity — Graeber's research found the psychological damage of pointless work was severe, but pointless work still beats no income. The deeper structural risk is that societies optimising for employment numbers rather than productivity would fall further behind those that accept disruption and redistribute the gains directly. It also creates a perverse incentive structure for corporations: if regulatory or social pressure rewards headcount, AI adoption slows, which may suit incumbent industries rather more than it suits workers. The political economy here is not tidy.

Watch for any signal that labour economists or policy institutes begin engaging seriously with this framing — particularly in jurisdictions already wrestling with automation displacement. If the conversation moves from philosophy to budget proposals, the reliability rating will need revisiting fast.

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